Guild Wars 2

Hello developers,

Thank you for making Guild Wars 2!

Straight to my question:

• Does load-balancing in the Megaserver system include any sort of flood control or throttle on the rate at which players can join an instance? (For example, players may join an instance at the rate of five players per second or something.)

Please walk with me through a brief word problem: Let’s say we have 50 players in a given instance of Bloodtide Coast. We’ll call these players “anchors.” Each of these anchors has 4 other party members in another instance of that same zone. We’ll call them “extras.” So… 50 anchors, 200 extras.

Now, let’s say that within the span of about 1000ms, those 200 extras all right-click on the 50 anchors and click “Join in Bloodtide Coast.”

• What is the expected behavior after this single action by those 200 extras?
• How many of them should make it in on the first try?
• For those that don’t make it in, what response should they see from the game?
• What is the expected behavior if, over the next five minutes, the remaining extras right-click on their anchor and attempt to join about once per second?

From what I understand, TTS Commanders regularly observe that our Evolved Jungle Wurm participant stacks show 50-70 players, counting stragglers in the field of view that are AFK and not in the stack. It doesn’t add up to the hard cap by any stretch. At the same time, there are perhaps 100 players trying to join the instance. Largely, they can’t. They report one of three things: 1) a message saying that the instance is full; 2) nothing – no join, and no notice that the instance is full; 3) a successful transition to the correct instance.

We do realize that there are players wandering around in the instance and not on the stack. But since it takes so long to prep for Evolved Wurm (if it is to be done well), it all starts with a head count, and waiting five minutes for the head count to creep up is a luxury our awesome Commanders just can’t afford. If we don’t have enough committed players, we have to move to a clean map to maximize the participation rate. So in that context, we’re having a really hard time making heads or tails of the behavior we observe. Your insight would be really appreciated.

Thank you!

…

Okay okay… a few more questions, if you had time to read this far!

• Do you have any advice on ways for a Commander to gain additional insight into how many actual players are on map? Commanders currently use /supplyinfo to check the participant count in their stack… see below.
• Is there any hope for queuing to be added to PVE zone instances?
• Is there any other feature on the development radar that will approximate queuing or otherwise alleviate the overcrowding issues we currently experience?
• What advice can you give to groups that struggle to coordinate during those capstone world events that require a substantial amount of prep work and coordination?